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A new study has linked bedsores acquired by patients during hospital stay to patient mortality and increased hospitalization.

The study lead by the dean of UCLA's School of Nursing used data directly from medical records to assess the impact of hospital-acquired pressure ulcers (bedsores) on Medicare patients at national and state levels.

The study claims that senior citizens who developed pressure ulcers were more likely to die during their hospital stay, to have longer stays in the hospital, and to be readmitted to the hospital within 30 days of their discharge, Medical Xpress reported.

For the study, the researchers tracked more than 51,000 randomly selected Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized across the United States in 2006 and 2007.

"Hospital-acquired pressure ulcers were shown to be an important risk factor associated with mortality," said Dr. Courtney Lyder, lead investigator on the study and dean of the UCLA School of Nursing. "It is incumbent upon hospitals to identify individuals at high risk for these ulcers and implement preventive interventions immediately upon admission."

The researchers say that those with existing chronic conditions like heart failure, diabetes, etc., are the ones at the highest risk.

One of the biggest challenges faced by the researchers while conducting the study was that there is no single database to help determine the incidence of pressure ulcers among hospitalized Medicare patients.

Thus, the researchers had to gather their data for the study from Medicare's claim history within the hospitalized Medicare population.

With this data, the researchers determined why and what kind of pressure ulcers were acquired by the patients, and found that 4.5 percent of the patients kept a track of bedsores during their stay in the hospital.

The study further revealed that most of the bedsores occurred on the tailbone or sacrum, followed by the hip, buttocks and heels.

It was found that out of about 3,000 individuals were admitted to the hospital with a pressure ulcer, 16.7 percent of them developed at least one new bedsore on a different part of their body during their stay in the hospital.

"This is a serious issue, and now we have data that can help the health care system address this ongoing problem," Lyder said. "When individuals enter the hospital with the risk conditions that we've identified, it should send up an immediate warning signal that appropriate steps should be taken to minimize the chance of pressure ulcers occurring."

The article is published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.